Mind-personality relations: Comment on Demetriou

The article by Demetriou et al. [1] represents an impressive documentation of the relations between intellectual ability constructs and personality constructs, in multi-wave studies of children and adolescents. The authors examined a variety of different measures of intellectual abilities, personality traits, and other variables (e.g., self-concept, emotional intelligence). They provide extensive and innovative analyses of the changes in both intellectual abilities and non-ability traits across the waves of data collection, and they also report some data on academic achievement criterion data. They also discuss several perspectives on both the structure of intellectual abilities and the structure of personality traits, though the main focus is on attempts to converge on the more “general” constructs (such as fluid intelligence, a construct they call “cognizance”, and a general factor of personality). Across these studies, the authors reach conclusions that intellectual ability changes during childhood and adolescence are related to personality constructs, such as “likeability”, though in many cases the effects are not consistent across the various ages under investigation.